On the Path to Personalized Teaching

Dale Worsley ([email protected]) is a school facilitator at the Education Alliance at Brown University, a teacher of writing at Columbia University, and a literacy consultant to public school districts. PREVIEW Personalized teaching takes stu-dents' individual characteristics and needs into account when planning and organizing the learning environment. Teachers also benefit from a more collaborative and collegial model that eliminates isolation. magine that you are a student at Tidewater High School, a fictitious comprehensive American high school that is organized into small learning communities. Units of study in each learning community are planned around the " big ideas " in each subject area and often have interdisciplinary ramifications. The idea in your current unit has been carefully articulated: " The concept of natural selection is important in science, mathematics, history, and literature. It has changed the way we see and understand the world. We must therefore be able to think about it flexibly and talk about it accurately. " Your learning community, the Marine Science Academy, often focuses on issues confronted by the local fishing industry. The city council is currently considering whether to lease city-owned offshore waters to salmon farmers, which would improve the local economy, but would cause problems if the farm-bred salmon escape and crossbreed with the wild salmon that inhabit the waters nearby. Students and teachers in your academy decide to study the salmon dilemma in your current unit of study. In biology class you and your classmates ask, If farm-bred salmon escape and crossbreed with the wild salmon, what traits might their offspring inherit? The question fits into the study of evolution in the state-mandated science curriculum. Teachers and students agree to divide the class into several groups. Each group will research one aspect of the project and share its information with the rest of the class. One group plans to create children's books that provide an overview of the topic, including the geology of the fossil record, a brief history of the concept, and basic scientific principles. You were tempted to join the children's book group, but because you have had some difficulty understanding the principles of genetic assortment that are presented in the textbook, your teacher has challenged you to teach the rest of the class how to interpret Punnett squares. In mathematics class you and your classmates are answering the question, At what ratios might inherited traits from farm-bred salmon persist? As part …